The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

Author:Amanda Coplin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2012-08-31T17:00:00+00:00

She stole a horse in a neighboring town—it was easy enough, outside a tavern at night—and discovered the next morning, having ridden the better part of the night, a venison sandwich in the saddlebags and, sewn into a handkerchief and stuffed into a hidden pocket, bills of money.

In Chelan she left the horse tied outside the general store, where somebody was sure to notice it that day or the next. She would not return to it. Bought new clothes at the feed and supply store, a new hat. Went to the barber’s for a haircut. Though they had shorn her at the hospital, her hair had grown considerably since then, fell almost to her shoulders.

Cut it all off, she told the barber, who regarded her at a loss.

She sat in the café across from the courthouse and contemplated a course of action. Should she go into the courthouse and ask to see him? But even if they let her in to see him, what would she say?

After she left the café, she toured the outside of the courthouse. As if she was looking for something. Around the back side there was a large fenced yard—for the prisoners, no doubt—and then beyond that, beyond a stretch of poor, bare field, forest. Foothills rising in the distance.

She came upon a group of boys, in knee-pants and flat caps, all of them, their backs to her, and as she watched, one of them lobbed some object—it was a brown soda bottle—over the high fence.

When they noticed her observing them, some flinched, until they saw she wasn’t going to go after them. One boy turned to her and said, Sometimes one of them (by his gesture she understood he was referring to the prisoners) gets a bottle, and they get into a fight. They use the bottle, they make it into a—knife. The boy grinned. It happened once. His brother saw it—he gestured to another boy.

When nothing happened—there weren’t even any prisoners in the yard—the boys dispersed.

But she stayed and studied the perimeter of the yard, the fence, for a long time. Before she left, she scanned the ground and tossed whatever she could find—rocks, sticks, other solid refuse—over the fence. And then left at once, not looking back over her shoulder.

Almost since the beginning—or for as long as she could remember, in the life she had lived with Jane—Della had moved according to Jane’s direction. Jane was the orchestrator, Della the follower. (Before this time was the time with their mother, and Della knew it should have been black—their mother was ill, and unhappy—but to Della this time was one great brightness.) But after Jane died, Della learned to get by on her own. Mostly her movement was dictated by her will to survive: walk this way; sleep here; eat this, but not that. Watch out for this person or animal; that person or animal is harmless. Today you do not need money; today you must earn money to buy food, because you are starving.

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